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Home , Doris Ulmann, Edward Steichen, Paul Outerbridge, Paul Strand, Pictorialism, Straight photography

The Clarence H. White School of

Bonnie Yochelson

Clarence Hudson White (1871–1925) is remembered today as a gifted Pictorial photographer whose talent was recognized and promoted by at the turn of the twenti- eth century. In 1906, White moved from Ohio to New York to work more closely with Stieglitz, but the two men parted ways in 1910, when Stieglitz turned his back on Pictorial pho- tography to promote . In New York, White began teaching photography, and his own art foundered. In 1923, he told a colleague, “I still have a thrill when I think I am on the right road, and a little envy when I see a beginner who appears to have arrived.”1 White’s legacy, however, leaves no cause for regret. His vision of photography’s future was prophetic; his social and aesthetic philosophy was con- sistent; and his program for training young photographers, which extended far beyond the classroom, was effective.2 By the time of his death, at age fifty-four, White had succeeded in establishing an institutional network to sup- port the artistic and professional ambitions of his students. The 1920s were a heady time, when an avowed socialist like White could launch his students’ art careers in the pages of Condé Nast magazines. That moment passed with the Depression, which deflated the artistic pretentions of pub- lishers, focusing their attention on the bottom line, and marked the collapse of the delicate balance of art and com- merce for which White had worked so tirelessly. But his efforts did not go unrecognized at the time. In 1938, the cultural magazine Coronet published profiles of twenty- two famous photographers. The first article was devoted to Stieglitz, whom the magazine dubbed a “man with a cause”; the second went to White, whom it called the fig.1 Gertrude Käsebier. Family Portrait (Clarence H. White and Family). 1902. “peaceful warrior.”3 Gum , 13 5/16 × 9 ¾" (33.8 × 24.8 cm). The , New York. Gift of Mrs. Hermine M. Turner

As a young man in the small town of Newark, Ohio, White worked as bookkeeper for a grocery firm. At age twenty-two he married Jane Felix and they honeymooned at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he first encountered convinced White to move his family to New York and to a wide array of international art. Soon thereafter, White become a professional photographer (fig. 1). Soon after his took up Pictorial photography, creating evocative tableaux arrival, he opened a studio, a block away from Stieglitz’s with Jane and her sister Letitia as his muses. Photography gallery on Fifth Avenue. linked him to the world beyond Newark: his Almost immediately White began to teach. In 1907, he earned him international recognition in Pictorial exhibitions was offered a job teaching Pictorial photography in the art and publications; he provided photographic illustrations department of ’s Teachers College.4 for books of fiction and poetry; and through home portrait The following year, he also began teaching at the commissions, he befriended prominent Midwesterners, Institute of Arts and Sciences (now the ). such as Walt Whitman’s biographer Horace Traubel and Teachers College and the Brooklyn Institute were founded legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow. Those early successes to educate the working class, and both grew dramatically

Yochelson 1 at the turn of the century in response to the huge swell of European immigrants. Because both programs trained art teachers, many of White’s students were women. The politi- cal agenda of those institutions reinforced White’s belief, based in his own experience, that art education could deep- en one’s appreciation of life and foster upward mobility.5 The chair of the Teachers College art department was Arthur Wesley Dow, a natural mentor for White, whose formal education had ended with high school. An accom- plished printmaker and , Dow had studied painting in and at the Pont-Aven artist colony in Brittany, and was a leading American expert on Japanese prints. Dow’s textbook Composition, first published in 1899, wedded Eastern and Western art principles and asserted the expressive value of formal qualities such as spatial arrangement and tonal variation. Drawing on a wide range of examples from the history of art, Dow isolated design prin- ciples, including repetition, symmetry, and opposition, that he hoped would form the basis of a national art and elevate public taste. Espousing the Arts and Crafts critique of the fig.2 . Vanishing Point II: Brooklyn Bridge From New York Side. 1912. Platinum print, 3 13/16 × 4 5/8" (9.7 × 11.7 cm). Amon Carter Museum of American Art, separation of fine and utilitarian art, Dow insisted that art Fort Worth. Image © Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Forth Worth students master a set of principles applicable to all art forms, from furniture and fabrics to painting and sculpture. That Dow found a place for Pictorial photography in his utilitarian theory fortified White’s belief that photographers could find a productive use for their art. White’s first important protégé was Karl Struss, who When White was hired by Teachers College, he entered studied with him at Columbia from 1908 to 1912. Struss car- the eye of a storm over educational reform. Inspired by ried out White’s instruction to “something close Columbia philosopher , the college’s faculty by” with a vengeance. He created dozens of New York street believed that the citizenry of a stable democracy must be scenes that demonstrate not only a mastery of Dow’s design capable of purposeful thinking and that education must principles but an understanding of (fig. 2).8 In 1912, be active and experimental, not passive and imitative. White arranged for an exhibition of Struss’s New York photo- Central to their philosophy was Dewey’s “project method,” graphs at Teachers College, and when White opened his which asked students to solve problems derived from own school in 1914, he turned over his studio to Struss, who their immediate experience rather than master a roster of began a business in photographic illustration. required subjects. White’s opening a school began as a way for him to In his teaching, White adapted Dewey’s project method escape the heat of New York summers. He spent two sum- to assignments based on Dow’s design principles. Like mers with photographer F. Holland Day on Georgetown Dewey, White asked his students to find their photographic Island in Maine, and in 1910 bought a rundown farmhouse subjects within their immediate environment and empha- near Day’s house and opened a summer school, where Day, sized problem-solving experiments. , who photographer Gertrude Käsebier, and painter Max Weber studied with White in 1917, recalled that he would send gave student critiques. This working vacation allowed White, students out to photograph “something close by” and that his wife, and their three boys to enjoy a luxury they could she was “aware, dimly, that there was some kind of underly- not otherwise afford (fig. 3). The summer school was the ing wisdom in the man that would choose this utterly banal forerunner of the Clarence H. White School of Photography, thing.”6 Like Dewey, White believed that a teacher’s goal which White opened in 1914 in a brownstone owned by St. was to lead students to self-discovery. Lange found this Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie, a historic church on the eastern side mysterious: “He would and did accept everything. He was of Greenwich Village. With classrooms and on most uncritical . . . [but] you walked into that dreary room the lower floors and White’s family living upstairs, the White knowing that something was going to happen. Now what School provided an environment in which students became happened I don’t know, but you never forgot it. I can hear his part of his extended family. voice still.”7 Embracing Dow’s credo of utilitarian art-making, Meanwhile, the Photo-, an elite corps of White arranged to have his students’ classroom assignments Pictorial photographers led by Stieglitz, came apart in the published in school publications, showing them that their wake of the 1910 International Exhibition of Pictorial work could and should be shared with the community. Photography at the Albright Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

Yochelson 2 founding of the Pictorial Photographers of America (PPA), which sought to draw together the nation’s best Pictorial photographers without the political infighting that had surrounded Stieglitz. The PPA’s first national initiative was to circulate two exhibitions to sixteen art museums, librar- ies, and art associations, and in 1918 its annual publication, Pictorial Photography in America, replaced Photo-Graphic Art as the White group publication. At the same time that the PPA was formed, White’s school moved to larger quar- ters, the legendary “Old Washington Irving House” on Gramercy Park.

The White School’s thirty-week course of study consisted of classes in photographic technique and art appreciation. Despite White’s personal preference for straight platinum printing, he hired Paul L. Anderson, an electrical engineer and close friend of Struss, to teach the full range of processes. Anderson’s old-fashioned aesthetics — he was opposed to Dow’s teaching — proved no obstacle to the open- minded White. Indeed, he hired Max Weber — a painter with no experience in photography, who had studied with Dow before spending five years in Paris absorbing the art fig.3 Clarence H. White. First Summer School, Five Islands, Maine. 1910. Platinum print, of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso — to teach art appreciation. 9 15/16 × 6 13/16" (25.3 × 17.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. Weber’s lectures combined Dow’s pedagogy with the B. S. Sexton in memory of her sister, Margaret DeM. Brown high-flying rhetoric of the French café. His approach to art history was pure Dow: he would compare a slide of a Rembrandt painting with that of a Hindu instrument, Chinese rug, or Mantegna canvas, because “design was design.”11 In Disputes over payments and unreturned prints veiled deeper his essay “The Filling of Space,” he wrote that the photogra- dissatisfaction with Stieglitz’s unyielding domination of the pher’s challenge was to use the medium’s “concrete aesthetic group at a time when his enthusiasm for Pictorial photogra- expression of the visible” to create abstract modern art. He phy was waning. White, Käsebier, and devised still-life studies “made from a choice of objects in all defected from the group, but it was White who led the which representation is abandoned” to help students effort to promote Pictorial photography without Stieglitz.9 “bring as much of the abstract into [their] expression as the With Stieglitz’s gallery off-limits, the group gathered at photographic means will allow.”12 The June 1916 issue of the Little Book-Shop Around the Corner, in the same neigh- Photo-Graphic Art featured four intelligent, if unconvincing, borhood as Stieglitz’s gallery and White’s studio. Opened attempts at abstract composition (fig. 4). In one of these in 1907 by publisher Mitchell Kennerley, the bookshop studies (lower right), Walter R. Latimer attempted a literal catered to the tastes of Kennerley’s authors and their friends, translation of Analytic Cubism by placing a window mat in including typographer Frederic W. Goudy and art critic front of partly opened drawers.13 Temple Scott, who joined White’s circle. It featured a section These initial still-life design exercises were quickly of fine-art photography books and a permanent exhibition surpassed by the work of Bernard Shea Horne, who used an of photographs by White, , Coburn, and overhead viewpoint, odd , and differential focus to other Pictorialists. By 1914, White’s friends and students obscure his subjects and force the viewer to concentrate were meeting at the bookshop for bimonthly print critiques on their abstract forms.14 In Design (fig. 5), which appeared by Weber. in Photo-Graphic Art in 1917,15 Horne propped a glass-plate White’s group also organized exhibitions at the Newark against a strongly backlit railing, creating an abstract Free Library and several Fifth Avenue galleries, which stripe pattern of light and shadow.16 normally showed American Impressionist paintings and The years 1910 to 1919 represent the first chapter in the old master prints. In 1913, the group launched Platinum Print, history of White’s teaching. During this period, many of which was renamed Photo-Graphic Art in 1916; the publication White’s students were middle-aged amateurs whose goal aimed to serve photographers — as had Stieglitz’s land- was personal enrichment, not building careers. Three stu- mark journal Work — but with an emphasis on “the dents represented in the Thomas Walther Collection were of entrance of the pictorialist in the field of illustrative art.”10 this type: Gertrude LeRoy Brown, a librarian; Latimer, an These activities culminated in 1917 with the White group’s engineer; and Horne, an independently wealthy widower, who

Yochelson 3 fig.4 M. W. “Design.” Photo-Graphic Art 3, no. 1 (June 1916). Courtesy The Miriam fig.5 Bernard S. Horne. Design. Reproduced in Photo-Graphic Art 3, no. 2 and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public (October 1917). Courtesy House, International Museum of Library. Clockwise from top left: photographs by Edna L. Tyler, Cornelia McCoy, Photography and Film Walter R. Latimer, Alice Choate

stayed on at the school to teach the photographic tech- Arnold Genthe on photographing modern . Stieglitz nique course from 1918 to 1926.17 Many of White’s younger and each spoke about , students from those years, however, forged careers in por- harshly criticizing White’s emphasis on design principles and traiture and photographic illustration and produced work his belief that modern art and were compatible. of lasting value. Among them were Dorothea Lange, Doris Also on the roster were leaders in the magazine field, such Ulmann, , and Clara Sipprell.18 as Condé Nast art director Heyworth Campbell, and Edward In the early 1920s, White’s program took final form. Steichen, newly hired as Condé Nast’s head photographer. When the lease on the Washington Irving house expired in In 1920, White helped establish the Art Center, which 1920, White moved his family and the school to a four-story occupied twin townhouses in midtown Manhattan, to bring brownstone in a pleasant residential Harlem neighborhood together seven organizations aimed at promoting “art and not far from Teachers College. With the help of alumni industry,” including the PPA. White was on the center’s and friends, he purchased the building and renovated it, add- founding board of directors and initiated the Art Center ing darkrooms and classrooms and removing its Victorian Bulletin.20 A central concern of the Art Center was the nexus furnishings. White hired new instructors from the ranks of among modern art, advertising, and photography. Did the Teachers College and White School alumni, including John new modern art represent the passing of the old order? P. Heins, a photographer and printmaker who graduated Could the formal innovations of modern art fulfill advertising Teachers College in 1919 and joined the faculty of the White goals? Could art directors mediate between artists’ ideals School the following year.19 and advertisers’ demands? Was photography a suitable To expand the students’ cultural horizons, White initi- medium for advertising? By the late 1920s, the answer to ated a program of Friday evening lectures, with speakers these questions was clearly yes, and White’s students were ranging from Ananda Coomaraswamy on Asian art to especially well positioned to take advantage of the new field

Yochelson 4 itself to the best advantage.”22 Scott illustrated his article with still lifes by Horne, Outerbridge, and , and a Watkins advertisement for the J. Walter Thompson agency. Outerbridge’s Ide Collar (fig. 7), which began as a White School exercise and appeared as an advertisement in Vanity Fair in November 1922 (fig. 8), best demonstrates the new style. A sculptural white collar is seen against a grid of squares, as though hovering over a gargantuan chessboard or a Lilliputian linoleum floor. The sharp focus makes legible the trade name inside the collar, as well as the neck size — 14 ¾ — of the slim imaginary owner. Outerbridge’s visual wit provided an image more compelling than the Ide Company’s routine advertisements, which por- trayed the dapper customer himself. In July 1925, just as his hope for a new commercial pho- tography was being realized, White died of a heart attack on a student trip to . The 1926 issue of the PPA’s Pictorial Photography in America, which was dedicated to his memory, included a section on advertising photography with an introduction by Watkins, who spoke for the new genera- tion that White had nurtured:

In the days of the Photo-Secession . . . no devout pictorialist would have deigned to descend to advertising. In their desire to establish photography as an art they became a bit precious; crudeness was distressing, materialism shunned.

fig.6 Margaret Watkins. “Photography Comes Into the Kitchen.” Vanity Fair 16, With Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso came a new approach. no. 8 (October 1921). Courtesy Condé Nast Archive Soulfulness was taboo; romance derided, anecdote scorned; beauty of subject was superseded by beauty of design, and the relation of ideas gave place to the relation of forms. . . . The comprehending photographer saw, paused, and seized his camera! And . . . the eye of the advertiser was alert. Here of advertising photography. The school’s still-life design were possibilities.23 exercises translated seamlessly into product display, and White’s contacts with editors and art directors gave his students access to potential clients. In 1921 and 1922, for example, Vanity Fair published a series of full-page fea- tures on modern photography, including ’s “cubist architecture,” ’s , and Francis Bruguière’s light abstractions. Also featured in the series were works by White School students Ira W. Martin, , Jr., and Margaret Watkins. “Photography Comes Into the Kitchen,” which appeared in October 1921, was subtitled, “A Group of Photographs by Margaret Watkins Showing Modernist, or Cubist, Patterns in Composition” (fig. 6). It was a short step from this coverage to editorial and advertising assignments. In a 1925 essay, titled “The Use of Photography in Advertising” and published in the Art Center Bulletin, Temple Scott championed White School still-life design exercises for product advertising. He wrote that if the photographer is an artist, photography can “set forth arrestingly the value fig.7 Paul Outerbridge. Ide Collar. 1922. Platinum print, 4 ½ × 3 5/8" (11.9 × 9.2 cm). or the utility of the commodity.”21 More tasteful and truth- The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the photographer ful than the writer’s strident copy or the painter’s prettified fig. 8 Advertisement featuring Outerbridge’s Ide Collar. Vanity Fair 19, no. 3 imagery was the “implied opinion” of “presenting the article (November 1922). Courtesy Condé Nast Archive

Yochelson 5 for the Weber and Heilbroner shops, which ran in every issue of the New Yorker for two years.27 During the Depression, Bruehl fared well, developing the Bruehl-Bourges pro- cess, which gave Condé Nast a monopoly on color illustration from 1932 to 1935. His commercial success did not preclude recognition as an artist. In 1931, art patron Alma Reed showed Bruehl’s work at her gallery and sponsored his travel to Mexico. In 1933, she published Photographs of Mexican Photographs, a book of twenty-five collotypes by Bruehl, including Potter (fig. 9), as plate 15.28 Bruehl was in the right place at the right time. After White’s death, the school fell into crisis. Financial difficulties abounded, and many supporters left, most notably Horne and Watkins, who were mainstays of the teaching staff. Jane White and Clarence White, Jr., kept the school open until 1942. Even without the creative force of its founder, the school remained a respected organization, far superior to its competitors.29 At the time of White’s death, the Art Center was flush with success. The popular embrace of modern art and design in the wake of the 1925 Paris world’s fair affirmed its mission. In the late 1920s, the center launched several forward-looking fig. 9 Anton Bruehl. Potter. 1932. Gelatin silver print, 1932–55, 9 11/16 × 7 ¾" (24.6 × 19.7 initiatives, including a campaign to improve the design of cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Paul roadside stands, an “opportunity gallery” for monthly exhibi- Outerbridge, by exchange (MoMA 1643.2001). © Estate of Anton Bruehl tions by emerging artists, and an annual exhibition by African American artists. Despite these efforts, the center fell victim to the Depression. In 1929, it merged with the New York Regional Art Council, and when the economy hit its nadir Among White’s students who pioneered advertising the two organizations were dissolved. One of the last exhibi- photography were Ira Martin, Wynn Richards, Margaret tions, however, was historic: Foreign Advertising and Industrial Bourke-White, Outerbridge, Steiner, Watkins, and Anton Photographs, assembled by art director Abbott Kimball and Bruehl, who became a giant in the field.24 held in March 1931, was the first of its kind in the United It is instructive to compare the advertising careers of States and included works by Cecil Beaton, László Moholy- Struss and Bruehl, two brilliant protégés of White’s from, Nagy, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, and Dziga Vertov. respectively, the early and the late chapters of his teaching While the Art Center remained open, the PPA thrived. career.25 With White providing introductions to magazine From 1927 to 1937, its president was White School alumnus editors, Struss secured assignments for editorial illustra- Ira Martin, who initiated a new bulletin, Light and Shade, with tions in Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazar (now Harper’s Bazaar). architectural photographer Thurman Rotan as its editor. Assignments for product advertisements followed, the best The bulletin proselytized for the “modern school” of straight of which were dramatic scenes in the style of his editorial photography, and it featured works by industrial and adver- work. Struss also experimented with the Hess-Ives process, tising photographers. With the closing of the Art Center, a complicated and ultimately failed attempt at commercial however, the PPA waned and became increasingly indistin- . After serving in World War I, Struss guishable from local camera clubs. moved to Hollywood to enter the emerging film business, armed with a letter of recommendation from the editor In a letter written shortly after White’s death, Stieglitz rumi- of Harper’s Bazar, who called him “one of the most distin- nated on what he saw as his colleague’s fate: guished photographers in the country.”26 He quickly became a leading cameraman, winning the first Academy Award Poor White. Cares and vexation. When I last saw him, he told for cinematography, in 1924. Struss had arrived on the New me he wasn’t as able to cope with them as 20 years ago. I remind- York advertising scene too early to succeed. ed him that I warned him to stay in business in Ohio — New York In 1926, Bruehl opened a commercial studio in New would be too much for him. But the Photo-Secession beckoned. York. Inspired by the publication of Outerbridge’s shirt-collar Vanity and ambition. His photography went to the devil — he photograph, he showed his student work to advertising tried to earn money as a teacher — his pupils — women — half- agencies, and two art directors immediately hired him. baked dilettantes — not a single real talent and all for what — a Bruehl’s ascent was swift, thanks to a successful campaign few hellers.30

Yochelson 6 Stieglitz’s grim judgments, partly attributable to his Ralph Steiner began work on his filmH2O (1929). These pio- misanthropic temperament and sexism, reveal two misun- neering works offer tantalizing hints of what White’s course derstandings about White’s career that have stubbornly might have led to. endured. The notion that New York was “too much” for The second misunderstanding about White’s career, so White is widely held. Even Peter Bunnell, White’s champion ungenerously noted by Stieglitz, was that White compro- since the 1960s, has attributed the decline in White’s art mised his art to support himself. In Stieglitz’s view, an artist’s to his “incomplete knowledge” of life in New York.31 integrity depended on his remaining impervious to the Although his manner was unassuming and his art highly demands of society, but to White, the choice between art personal, White was a sophisticated man who expanded and society was a false one. White sought fulfillment for the his range of cultural interests in New York. His strength as artist in society, a goal as demanding, indeed as utopian, as a teacher was not solely his ability to inspire; he gave his Stieglitz’s. White’s achievement is more consonant with students the benefit of his associations with leaders in art, developments in Europe, where a freer interchange between theater, dance, and publishing. The threat to his art was photography, modern art, and commercialism occurred. not New York City but his decision to put teaching first. The philosophy of the Bauhaus, which also grew out of the That White was a visionary teacher is apparent in an Arts and Crafts movement, was not unlike White’s, and initiative left unfinished at the time of his death. One of the works by White students Outerbridge, Steiner, and Bruehl students on the Mexico trip was Stella Simon, whose inter- were included in the exhibition Film und Foto organized by the est in film had inspired White to schedule a film course Deutscher Werkbund — the precursor of the Bauhaus — in for the 1926 school year.32 In the turmoil following White’s Stuttgart in 1929. The 1931 Art Center exhibition of advertis- death, the course was canceled. Simon then traveled to ing and industrial photographs is a pendant to that milestone Berlin, where she completed her experimental abstract film of European . “Poor White” left a rich legacy Hands (1928). At the same time, White School alumnus behind him.

notes

1. Clarence H. White, quoted in 4. Fellow Ohioan O. Walter Beck, 9. Karl Struss, who was the last 15. Photo-Graphic Art 3, no. 2 John W. Gillies, ed., “Statements who taught composition at the photographer Stieglitz asked to (October 1917): n.p. by Pictorialists,” in Principles of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, recom- join the Photo-Secession, strad- Pictorial Photography (New York: mended White to his colleague dled the divide between Stieglitz 16. For a comparison of this pho- Falk, 1923), p. 21; reprinted in Peter Arthur Wesley Dow, who had and White and played a leading tograph and Paul Strand’s Porch C. Bunnell, ed., A Photographic left Pratt in 1904 to chair the art role in White’s organizational Shadows, and for Strand’s atten- Vision: Pictorial Photography, 1889– department at Teachers College. activities from 1910 to 1917. dance at White circle events, see 1923 (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Bonnie Yochelson, “Paul Strand’s Smith, 1980), p. 206. 5. White continued to teach at the 10. Platinum Print 1, no. 1 (October Not-So-Revolutionary Photographs Brooklyn Institute until 1922 and at 1913): 13. of 1916,” in Patricia G. Berman and 2. See Bonnie Yochelson, Teachers College until his death. Gertje R. Utley, eds., A Fine Regard: “Clarence H. White Reconsidered: 11. “The Reminiscences of Max Essays in Honor of Kirk Varnedoe An Alternative to the Modernist 6. Dorothea Lange, quoted Weber,” interview by Carol S. (London: Ashgate Press), pp. Aesthetic of Straight Photography,” in Maynard Pressly White, Gruber (New York: Oral History 154–65. Studies in Visual Communication Jr., Clarence H. White: A Research Office, Columbia 9, no. 4 (Fall 1983): 24–44; and Personal Portrait (Ann Arbor, University, 1958), p. 38. 17. For more information about Bonnie Yochelson, “Clarence Mich.: University Microfilms each of these students, see H. White, Peaceful Warrior,” in International, 1975), p. 193. 12. Max Weber, “The Filling of biographical reports by Bonnie Marianne Fulton, ed., Pictorialism Space,” Platinum Print 1, no. 2 Yochelson in the Thomas into Modernism: The Clarence 7. Ibid., pp. 193–94. (December 1913): 6. Walther Collection research files, H. White School of Photography Department of Photography, The (Rochester, N.Y.: George Eastman 8. Struss worked closely with Max 13. The Thomas Walther Museum of Modern Art. House, 1996), pp. 10–119. Weber and A. L. Coburn, both Collection includes a much more of whom were applying Cubist successful modernist work by 18. Dorothea Lange (Teachers 3. Robert Marks, “Man With strategies to urban subjects at the Latimer, Concourse, Jersey City College, 1914–15); a Cause,” Coronet 4, no. 5 time. See Bonnie Yochelson, “Karl Station of 1915 (MoMA 1756.2001). (Teachers College, 1915, and White (September 1938): 161–70; and Struss’ New York,” New York to School, 1915–18); Laura Gilpin “Peaceful Warrior,” Coronet 4, no. 6 Hollywood, The Photography of Karl 14. Four of Horne’s still life (White School, 1916–17); and Clara (October 1938): 161–71. Struss (Albuquerque: University designs are in the Walther Sipprell (White School, 1916–17). of New Mexico Press, 1995), pp. Collection: MoMA 1702.2001, 90–143. 1703.2001, 1704.2001, and 1705.2001.

Yochelson 7 19. For more information about 26. Letter from John Chapman Simon who first introduced Levy to Heins, see biographical report by Hilder “To Whom It May Concern,” the photography scene, and in 1931, Bonnie Yochelson in the Thomas February 6, 1919, Stephen Levy borrowed White prints from Walther Collection research files. White Collection of Karl Struss her for Retrospective of American Papers, Amon Carter Museum Photography, the inaugural exhibi- 20. The three most active of the of American Art Archives, Fort tion of the Julien Levy Gallery in seven organizations were the Worth, Tex. New York. See Julien Levy, Memoir PPA; the American Institute of of an Art Gallery (New York: G. P. Graphic Arts, of which Goudy was 27. The Walther Collection Putnam’s Sons, 1977), p. 55. a founder; and the Art Directors includes a Bruehl print (MoMA Club, which was founded in 1920. 1641.2001) that appeared in a 1929 Weber and Heilbroner campaign. 21. Temple Scott, “The Use of Photography in Advertising,” Art 28. Anton Bruehl, Photographs Center Bulletin 3, no. 7 (March of Mexico (New York: Delphic 1925): 172. Studios, 1933).

22. Ibid., p. 173. 29. The two other photography schools in New York in the 1920s 23. Margaret Watkins, were the New York Institute “Advertising and Photography,” of Photography, a mere trade Pictorial Photography in America 4 school, and the Studio School, (1926): n.p. run by Benjamin Rabinovitch, an old-fashioned Pictorial portrait 24. Ira Martin (White School, photographer. 1918–19); Wynn Richards (White School, 1918–19); Margaret 30. Letter from Alfred Stieglitz to Bourke-White (Teachers College, Heinrich Kuhn, August 25, 1925, 1921–22); Paul Outerbridge (White Stieglitz Collection, Beinecke School, 1921–22); Ralph Steiner Library of Rare Books and (White School, 1921–22); Margaret Manuscripts, , New Watkins (White School, 1917; Haven, Conn. staff 1919–23); and Anton Bruehl (White School, 1923–24). 31. Peter C. Bunnell, Clarence H. White: The Reverence for Beauty 25. For more information about (: Ohio University Gallery Bruehl, see biographical report by of Fine Art, 1986), p. 17. Bonnie Yochelson in the Thomas Walther Collection research files. 32. Lillian Sabine, “Mrs. Stella Also see Gael Newton, ed., In the F. Simon, New York City,” Abel’s Spotlight: Anton Bruehl Photographs, Photographic Weekly 50, no. 1902–1950s (Canberra: National 1293 (October 1, 1932): 235. Gallery of Australia, 2011); and Coincidentally, Simon was Bonnie Yochelson, Anton Bruehl accompanied on the fateful trip (New York: Howard Greenberg by her son Louis and his Harvard Gallery, 1998). classmate Julien Levy. It was

Citation: Bonnie Yochelson. “The Clarence H. White School of Photography.” In Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg, eds. Object:Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949. An Online Project of The Museum of Modern Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014. http://www.moma.org/interactives/ objectphoto/assets/essays/Yochelson.pdf.

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